English summaries

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Summaries of the articles

Reeta Pöyhtäri

Like genre, like presentation.

Articulations of immigration and immigrants in magazines.

This article discusses the articulations of immigration and immigrants in Finnish senior’s magazine ET, women’s magazine Me Naiset, news magazine Suomen Kuvalehti and trade union magazine Rakentaja in 2003-2006, a period before an actual political debate on the issues began. Immigration in media has often been studied through news journalism, which possibly gives a one-sided view of the matter. News journalism often aggravates and shows mainly the negative sides of an issue, unlike many magazine stories which approach the issues from a positive perspective.

Differences between individual magazines are further highlighted by the fact that magazines present topical issues in a way that suits their genre and concept. This article discusses what kind of positions of saying and doing things are articulated for immigrants in magazines of different genres. It also asks, how the genre relates to the choices of immigrant persons and issues presented. Furthermore, the article discusses what kind of immigration and immigrants different magazines suggest to be acceptable in the Finnish context.

All the magazines have their own typical representatives of immigrants. An overlapping characteristic of these typical representatives of immigrants in different magazines is that they all present immigration from a viewpoint that is closely related to the genre and close enough for the readers of the magazine in question. The magazines use immigrants as experts on their personal lives and their new home country, but rarely as actual experts. For the analysis quantitative content analysis and articulation theory are used.

Leena Ripatti-Torniainen

Capable citizen and developing person: The relevance of Bildung to public journalism

The article analyzes the citizenship ideal of the formative texts of the US public journalism, written by Jay Rosen and Davis Merritt in the first half of 1990s. By employing the methodology of intellectual history, the article demonstrates that Rosen and Merritt conceive individuals’ moral awakening and the widening of individual perspectives as central processes of citizenship and public life. Rosen and Merritt argue individuals have a duty to engage with the public issues of their time.

Further, Rosen and Merritt argue for a culture that orients individuals towards this duty and supports their growth. The article reveals that Rosen and Merritt’s early texts share a common ground with the European ideal of Bildung. The work of John Dewey, a central philosopher in public journalism, is discussed in the article within this argument. Finally, the article analyzes the Finnish reception of public journalism and demonstrates that, despite the extensive authority of Bildung in Finland, Finnish researchers have not recognized the closeness of public journalism to the Bildung concept.

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Maija Töyry, Laura Saarenmaa, Nanna Särkkä

Challenge of Multidisciplinarity – Towards better concept and research awareness in magazine studies.

There is a substantial amount of research done on magazines in various academic disciplines in Finland. The article examines the heterogenic field of magazine research, and pinpoints the distinctive features of magazine research in Finnish universities.

Firstly, the research on magazines is mostly situated in other disciplines than in media and communication studies. Secondly, the majority of the studies approach magazines rather as source materials than actual objects of research. The empirical data of the article consists of 1963 research references that are listed in the database of magazine journalism research established in Aalto University in 2009.The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the database findings demonstrate the amount and variety of magazine research, which can be seen as one of the unacknowledged, but strong areas of media studies.

Lauri Haapanen

The functions and editing of quotations in literary-journalistic magazine articles

Speech quotations are a central but rarely studied element of magazine article’s narration. In this article I study the functions of speech quotations. The article belongs to the field of journalism studies but it also has a narratological and linguistic-pragmatical dimension. My data consists of six literary- journalistic magazine articles. Based on my narratological text analysis I have concluded

that the speech quotations 1) create a rhythm for the text, 2) are one of the narrative elements that propel the plot forward, 3) create and intensify the physical and/or social environment, 4) enhance the plausibility that the speech of the person quoted has been reproduced in the authentic verbatim way, 5) tell about the speaker’s unique way of using language and their first-hand experiences, and 6) characterize the quoted speaker, because the way in which the utterance has been said transmits a lot of the speaker’s character. It is important to notice, that these six functions of my speech quotation apparatus do not exclude one another. This means that every speech quotation basically carries the potential of all of the functions discussed above. As my secondary research question I study how utterances should be arranged in the written form based on a large review of literature and textbooks on journalistic writing as well as interviews with magazine writers and editors. Very common advice on how to arrange the quotations is to delete vernacular cues (e.g. repetitions and ”expletives”), to toughen reciprocal links between clauses, and to merge together utterances recorded in different points in time of an interview. However, if there is any location written in the story, the dialogue should also be situated in the authentic chronology and context. Finally, I relate my findings to the current discussion about the economic and content-related challenges of journalism, especially from the ethics point of view.